Chapter 3 #2
“Mrs Ashworth tells me you have been promising to visit for two years,” she said.
“Promising is correct. The coming took longer.” He stopped to look at the pear tree with what appeared to be genuine interest. “I was in Paris for most of last year. Before that, Lisbon. Before that, Lyon. A winter in Rome, though that was longer ago.”
“You move a great deal.”
“I do.” Without apology, without the slight defiance people sometimes produced when admitting things they expected to be judged for.
It was simply true, and he wore it simply.
“My father despairs of it. He was born at the chateau, he will die at the chateau, and everything between has happened within twenty miles of it. He cannot understand why I would leave.”
“Can you explain it to him?”
He considered this seriously, which she had not entirely expected. “Not well. The best I have managed is that I cannot yet see the shape of things from where I am, and I keep hoping that if I move I will find the angle from which it becomes clear.” He glanced at her. “?a vous semble ridicule?”
“No,” Jane said. And then, because it was true: “Though I wonder what shape you’re looking for.”
“So do I,” he said. “That is rather the problem.”
She looked at him briefly, the profile of him against the morning sky, the easy angle of his shoulders, and found the answer more charming than she thought it ought to be.
A man of twenty-four who did not know what he was looking for was not, on examination, a reassuring thing.
She thought this and found it made no difference and kept walking.
They went through the gate at the far end of the walled garden and took the path along the edge of the parkland where the grass was silver with dew and the mist was still burning off between the oaks.
“And you?” he said. “Mrs Ashworth mentioned the school. Tell me yourself.”
She told him about the numbers of children, the subjects, the difficulty of attendance through harvest months, the twice-weekly hamper for the children who arrived hungry.
He listened without interrupting, his eyes on the path, his hands in his coat pockets.
When she finished he was quiet for a moment before he spoke, which meant he had heard it rather than simply waited through it.
“You built it yourself,” he said.
“With help. My friend Mary arrived in the second year.”
“But the idea was yours. The argument to your father. The letters to the society.”
“Yes.”
“C’est remarquable.” Not flattery, the same register as useful had been, the day before. Observation rather than performance. “In France a woman must work through the Church or through a husband’s name. You did this as yourself.”
“England has its advantages,” Jane said.
She found herself, without quite meaning to, waiting to see what he would ask next.
Whether he would ask about the building, the account, the practical matter of how it was sustained, the questions that showed interest in the thing rather than in its reflection on the person who built it.
Mary would have asked. Leonora would have asked, in her dry precise way.
He said: “And its arrangements,” and something in the word made her glance at him, but he was looking ahead and his expression told her nothing, and she let it pass.
The path curved and they came out above the ornamental lake, the surface still and grey-green in the early light, a pair of ducks moving without urgency near the far bank. They stopped without deciding to.
“Tell me about Normandy,” Jane said.
He spoke about it specifically, not the France of travel writing but real things.
The smell of the apple orchards in August, fermenting windfalls in the heat.
The light over the Channel going grey and then silver in autumn, a colour with no name.
The village below the chateau where his mother kept a kitchen garden and knew every family by three generations.
The sound of the sea at night from his bedroom window, which he had fallen asleep to for eighteen years and which came back to him in other cities at inconvenient moments.
Jane listened and asked questions and followed the details and noticed, as he talked, how his face changed when he spoke about the place, something opening in it, a warmth that was different from the social warmth he carried through rooms. This was not performance.
Whatever else might be performance, this was not.
It was the first time she thought the words whatever else, and she noted them going past.
“You miss it,” she said.
“Oui. And I leave it anyway. People are not always sensible about what they love.” He looked at the lake. “Your school, you will miss it while you are here?”
“I’m already missing it.” The words came out before she had decided on them, honest and slightly more unguarded than she’d intended. He produced this without pressure, simply by attending to her completely, so that the true thing was always the better answer.
She was aware that this could be trusted or not trusted and that she had not yet determined which.
He turned to look at her. His eyes in the outdoor light were very clear, a blue that the morning intensified. The sky behind him was exactly the same colour and the coincidence was not, at this moment, helpful. She held his gaze for a moment and then looked at the lake.
“C’est ?a,” he said quietly. That’s it. “When you have made something. It stays with you even when you leave it.”
“Yes,” Jane said.
They stood with the water before them and the morning going on around them and Jane was aware, with the part of her mind she could not silence however much she tried, that she was standing alone at a lake with a man she had met the day before yesterday.
That she had come here this morning without asking herself clearly whether she should.
That she was finding it easier to be honest with him than with people she had known for years, which was either because of something in him or because of something in herself she should be more careful about.
She had not yet determined which of these was true and the uncertainty was itself a reason to be cautious.
She was being cautious, she told herself. She was here, being cautious, at a lake, alone, with a man whose eyes were the colour of the sky.
The sensible thing was to turn back. To say she was cold, or that the walk had been pleasant and she had letters to write. He would understand. It was a simple thing.
“Eh bien,” he said at last, before she had resolved anything. “Shall we walk back? I believe Mrs Ashworth intends to organise something after breakfast.”
“That has been my experience,” Jane said.
They turned back along the path. The mist had lifted and the morning had become itself, clean and pale and cool.
Walking back she was on his left, and once where the path narrowed he stepped aside for her, and as she passed him she was briefly aware of the fact of him, the height of him against the morning, the warmth that came off a person in cold air, and the distance she put between them when the path widened was deliberate, and small, and not quite enough.
At the garden steps he paused.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. Lightly, without pressure.
She looked at him. The morning light was full on his face now and it was, she thought with the part of herself she wished would occasionally be quiet, a very good face. She thought: I should say no. She thought it clearly and completely, with full access to her own reasons.
“?a dépend du temps,” she said. It depends on the weather.
He looked up at the sky, which was clear in every direction, and back at her with an expression of polite and entirely accurate scepticism.
“Bien s?r,” he said. Of course.
She went inside. On the stairs she passed the hall mirror and looked briefly at her own face and found it unhelpful.